U.S. funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health require researchers to supply detailed, cost-effective plans for managing research data, called Data Management Plans.

Several universities and organizations are developing the DMPTool to help researchers meet these new requirements. In specific, the DMPTool will help researchers:

Database of metadata schema; browse by discipline, results include related tools for capturing or creating metadata.

What is Metadata?

Think of what information would be needed to understand and analyze your data, and/or replicate your results, 20 years from now. That’s what needs to be included in your metadata. People are fond of saying that metadata is “data about data.” NISO has a nice guide called Understanding Metadata.

For a given research project, metadataare generally created at two levels: project- and data-level. Project-level metadata describes the “who, what, where, when, how and why” of the dataset, which provides context for understanding why the data were collected and how they were used.

Examples of project-level metadata are:

Name of the project

Dataset title

Project description

Dataset abstract

Principal investigator and collaborators

Contact information

Dataset handle (DOI or URL)

Dataset citation

Data publication date

Geographic description

Time period of data collection

Subject/keywords

Project sponsor

Dataset usage rights

Dataset level metadata are more granular. They explain, in much better detail, the data and dataset. (perhaps not surprisingly).